The Failure of the Winter Calculus

Most of my automotive problems are of my own making. Fundamentally, I have too many cars and not enough space, and I know that. During the pandemic years, my wife and I talked about finding a car-centric property, but we never agreed on how far from Boston we wanted to be, and her basic tack of “I’ll move, but not just for a metal outbuilding” was not in the least unreasonable. Plus, in addition to those parameters, there’s the fundamental issue of supply and cost. That is, properties that are thrilling (say, mountain or ocean views) with houses that are thrilling (say, mid-century modern or a restored farmhouse that’s modern and airy) that also have car-collector-sized garages or outbuilds are hen’s-teeth rare, and when they come up, are very pricey.

So we stay in our house on 6600 square feet in suburban Boston. As I’ve explained many times, the 31×17-ft attached garage can house three cars, or four if you put one on wheel dollies and skooch it sideways. However, this only works if a) the garage is uncluttered, and b) the cars are short. Two BMW 2002s or two vintage Lotuses work fine, but my BMW 635CSi and my Bavaria are too long to fit, though you can get around this by putting one car on the mid-rise lift and tucking the nose of another under its tail. There is also the safety valve of the sliding door on the left wall of the garage that opens up under the back deck, but due to clutter in both places, I haven’t put a car under there in a decade. The other must-store-out-of-the-elements cars are kept in offsite storage that’s affordable because it’s 70 miles from my home.

With a total of 13 vehicles, this is far from ideal, but it all has kind of worked—three cars inside the garage, five more stored in the warehouse in Monson MA, and the others (mainly daily drivers and purpose-use vehicles like the SUV) left to fend for themselves in the driveway. I need to be careful to stage the cars in December so the ones I want to work on over the winter, plus the BMW E9 3.0CSi which is valuable enough that I’m uncomfortable leaving in the warehouse, are here over the winter. This has also kind of worked—I retrofitted air conditioning into the BMW 2002tii a few winters ago, and have done multiple over-winter projects on the Lotus Europa.

But the past few months, it’s kind of train-wrecked. When I sold the Winnebago Rialta RV and bought the FrankenThirty (the BMW E30 3 Series whose rebuilt salvage title I should’ve taken more seriously) last August, I knew the car could come in the garage on a need-to-wrench basis but needed to live outside, and that has been its fate. Then, the purchase of the 1969 Lotus Elan +2 pushed the car count up to the previously unprecedented level of 14. I was saved by an unlikely source—my 98-year-old next-door neighbor who still drives her 2012 Honda Accord (and whose battery I keep charged because she doesn’t drive it often enough) but doesn’t use her garage. However, really, I needed two more spaces, and that was only one.

And thus I came into this winter with the E9 3.0CSi, the Elan +2, and the Europa as the garage queens. Back in December, I looked at putting the Europa on wheel dollies, sliding it sideways, and making room for the E30 (whose air conditioning resurrection is my winter project), but the E9 was already in the back left corner of the garage, and it and the Europa won’t fit nose-to-nose unless I complete de-clutter the front, back, and left sides of the garage. Since my experience has been that when I do sardine four cars in there, there’s no space to get actual work done, I decided against it.

Bad move. I should’ve bitten the bullet and sardined the cars, or simply paid for another over-winter space in the warehouse in Monson for the Europa. Air conditioning work on the FrankenThirty was possible for a while by coaxing the Lotus into consciousness (though I hated to start its engine with its molasses-like 20W50 oil only to move it 20 feet) and leaving it in the driveway for a few days at a time. But now the driveway is a sheet of ice, particularly the portion right in front of the garage door where snow melt pools.

In my defense, winters here have on average been milder the past 10 years as compared with the previous 30, but “on average” doesn’t mean you won’t get slapped with a cold snowy one, and we have.

Last week I wrote about replacing the carburetor in the snowblower (again), and with another storm forecast to move in, I gave one more look at the garage. This time, I had an epiphany: If I raised the Elan up on the lift and tucked the nose of the Europa waaaaaay under it, maybe there was enough room to park the E30 on a diagonal. I took a length and width measurements, and it looked like it was possible.

So I tried. I first made sure that the E30 would start (it did), then pulled the Armada, my E39 530i, and my wife’s Honda Fit out of the driveway, and staged the E30 near the garage door.

Next, I raised the Elan up on the mid-rise lift, over which it was already parked. Unfortunately I’d forgotten that one of the mid-rise lift’s two hydraulic cylinders shoots hydraulic fluid across the garage if I try to raise it up to the three-foot or four-foot stops, and at the two-foot stop, the nose of the Europa still wouldn’t clear the Elan’s rear wheels. I pulled the wheels off, which gave me just enough clearance for the Europa’s fenders to fit beneath the Elan’s rear knuckles.

I then rolled the Europa forward until the Elan’s tailpipe was within a thumb’s width of the Europa’s recently-replaced windshield.

Okay. Here we go. I started the E30, slowly eased its nose into the garage, then did the abrupt left turn needed to set up the diagonal. I found that I didn’t have enough room to clear the left rear corner of the Europa, so I took a floor jack, put it under the Europa’s transaxle, and dragged the back of the car to the right while being careful not to put the car’s windshield into the Elan’s exhaust pipe.

I inched the E30 further forward, then found I couldn’t open up either door to get out and eyeball the clearance, as the right door was blocked by the Europa, and the left door was blocked by a set of four E30 basketweave wheels I had stacked up. I rolled down the window and gently pushed them into a controlled tumble. I then got out of the car, walked around it, and was horrified to see that its rear wheels were sitting on the sheet of ice at the base of the driveway. Crikey, I thought, if this doesn’t work, I might not be able to back the car out. I began to think about the logistics of using the Armada in 4WD to tow the E30 backwards, wondering if I could do it alone or if I needed to rope someone else into helping me.

But I went all in. I pulled the E30 in as far as I dared, got out, verified that its front bumper was almost touching the nose of the E9, then walked around the back of the car and saw that it wasn’t even close—about a foot and a half was still hanging out. This is the problem with shoehorning something in at a diagonal. It’s the not the length that matters, it’s the diagonal distance.

Well, crap.

I began to gently back the car out and imagined rear-sliding horror, the rear quarter panels of the car losing traction and skidding into the door posts, but it worked fine. Then I remembered—the car is a 325is, and for all its Franken-car caveats, it does still have the limited-slip differential that the “is” model came with.

I left the Europa slid all the way under the tail of the Elan, as this does allow me to pull the nose or tail of the E30 in if I want to jack it up with the garage door open, as I did with the Armada last winter. I then parked the E30 in its outdoor spot near the base of the driveway, and returned the Armada and the Fit to their normal spots.

And then I had another epiphany: This all might have worked had I gone for broke getting the mid-rise lift up to three feet, and switched the cars—put the tail of the E30 under the tail of the Elan, and put the Europa (which is much shorter than the E30) in on a diagonal. Or it might have worked had I swapped the E9 and the Elan—put the longer E9 up on the lift, and the shorter Elan in the left rear corner. But no. I was done.

That night, about six inches of snow fell, followed by rain that turned it to slush. I blew out what I could, but then temperatures dropped, turning what remained to cement. Nothing but the daily drivers will be moving for a while.

As I write this, we’re over halfway through February. March will be here and do its “out like a lion” thing before you know it. But when I could’ve solved the problem simply by ponying up for another space in Monson for three or four months, I feel like I was, as I often am, penny-wise and pound foolish. Then again, even though hundred-ish-dollar-a-month indoor storage is about as cheap as it comes, when there are five cars and the bill comes every three months, I am reminded that the problem is not storage but the number of cars and the expenses associated with owning them.

Damn, I said the quiet part out loud.

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Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.